On Tuesday March 31, 2009 the annual Oracle Benelux User Group will be held in Antwerp. Logica will be present as one of the gold sponsor. Our key presentation is focused on Flexible employee Benefits in Oracle.

Employee benefits are of increasing importance in today’s labor market. The relationship between employer and employees is more mature than ever, and employees are keen on making individual benefit choices. Facilitating those individual choices is becoming increasingly challenging, and costly, for HR departments. Giving employees freedom of choice by means of self service and showing, in real time, the financial implications of individual choices is both highly motivating for employees and highly efficient for the HR department. Logica will explain her vision on this development and will, based on the Tasper Benefit Shop explain how this can be supported in an Oracle / PeopleSoft environment.

In our stand we will present a running demo of the Tasper / PeopleSoft solution. We are also providing information on Famous, our conversion and migration factory and Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA).

The last event, held in Utrecht in 2007, attracted around 800 visitors. I’m wondering how the economic situation will affect the number of attendees and the topics presented. Focus should be on cost saving solutions. Also I’m looking forward to the presentation by José Lazares on AIA. Maybe not directly a cost saving solution, but certainly the way forward in embracing the future Oracle applications.

Many say that the ICT landscape are on the eve of yet another major revolution. Yes, another. The Internet hype is just behind us and the financial implications have been cleaned up. The SOA (service oriented architecture) hype hasn’t even had its peak. And now is the latest developments passing us from the right. The developments in the ICT industry are faster than cars are leaving the first Ford  factory.

L’ERP est mort, vive L’AIA!?
The scholars have not yet agreed whether all dinosaurs died via a big bang or that this is done gradually. Thus, the trend watchers cannot even agree where ERP will extinct. It’s clear that these systems have had their longest time. As the newest ICT generation now looks pity at the Mainframe cowboys, over 20 years we will look with great surprise to the ERP people.

About a year ago I raised the question how to prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications. Within Logica we had chosen to focus on creating awareness for the changes Fusion Apps would bring. In this so called Tour de Fusion programme we focused on several topics like SOA, BPEL and BPM. Topics which not only existed in theory, but already were supported with tools by Oracle. For instance the Oracle SOA suite or Oracle BPA suite. This allowed our consultants to work (‘to stand with their feet in the mud’) with these products in our skill centre environment. Examples are interfaces between PeopleSoft and eBusiness Suite based on BPEL. A rudimentary way of application integration.

At Openworld 2008 Oracle delayed the launch of Fusion Apps until end 2009 / beginning 2010. What is the impact on our competence development in general and the Tour de Fusion programme in particular?